By any measure, telecom is a fairy concentrated market that creates antitrust concerns, relative to many other industries. But the comparison to telecom only highlights the market concentration in tech. There are four major wireless carriers, none with more than about a third of the market. Google has 90% of the search market. There are just two viable mobile OS competitors, and Android has 75% market share (50% in the US). Even within a given market, there is more competition in telecom. The big four cellular companies are nationwide. Verizon is just the sixth largest wireline carrier, has less than 40% market share across its FiOS footprint. That does not mean that telecom (or day health insurance) is a highly competitive market. It’s not. But at least search and mobile is even less competitive.
It also matters what is happening going forward. Even in areas with no wired competition, wireless (cellular and satellite) exerts competitive pressure. 15% of high income households have abandoned wired internet for cellular only, and that number is growing. (There are more cellular-only households by a large margin than ones that use something other than Google search.) Meanwhile, there is no viable competition in sight for Google Search or Android.
> There are four major wireless carriers, none with more than about a third of the market.
Can that be said for wired internet carriers? And can that be said at the municipal level and not just the national level? My point is that in many areas, people generally don't have a choice in who their internet provider is. So if you look nationally, yes, the coverage is split between several companies, but at the local levels the areas serviced are often carved up such that there are local monopolies.
Where I live, in a suburb well within the metro area around the city of Seattle (WA), I am LUCKY to have even one provider that offers at least 25Mbit (per second, down). They thankfully offer 1 Gigabit down packages (very recently, YEARS behind when Seattle got this 'city wide').
HOWEVER, there is ZERO competition so:
* data-caps
* horrendous over-charges
* UPLOAD (on a 1000Mbit line) ~= 30 Mbit
Yes, that's right, the upload is about ONE THIRTIETH, a very small fraction, of the download. Even the BUSINESS plans don't go much higher (while costing tons more, and really only having a support that will say sorry and give a small credit with no actual rush on support; in past experience).
So very much no. The wired-line sector is a natural monopoly that should be like roads to the airport. I should pay a very small bit in taxes for good connections to the global hub, and at said global hub I should have my choice of services from many providers.
70% chance if your in Centurylink's territory they'll offer you 1 Gig for $65 a month (no contract, free modem, price for life, no BS fees) that you can sign up for here: https://www.centurylink.com/home/
Comcast is hot garbage, both the offerings I mention are fiber, and the gaps seem to be caused by poor enforcement of the franchise agreements in the relevant locality, eg: Frontier was supposed to have 100% fiber coverage in Kenmore a decade ago, but the city isn't consistently assessing them fines so there is no reason to meet the contract.
wow, I'd think Seattle being a major tech hub would have better internet.
I live in a farming community 15 minutes from the nearest small city (Google: Paragonah Utah), and we have few competitors but for $90 I get 1 gig fiber. There's not many places in utah where you can't get at least 100-300mb.
The state had the forsight to lay tons of conduit a decade or two ago whenever they do road work so that there's plenty of space for bandwidth upgrades and what not across the entire state.
If you’d expect that of Seattle, try looking at domestic broadband options in Silicon Valley.
For huge swathes you can have lovely ancient old ADSL on your copper phone line or Comcast via cable. Oh and all Comcast plans in the Bay Area, regardless of what the marketing says, have a 1 TB bandwidth cap and charge for overages up to 200 dollars on top of your monthly bill, unless you pay them an additional 50 bucks a month to get the _actually_ unlimited option on all of the plans offered. As you can imagine, many of us living here routinely blow through a terabyte of bandwidth - just one cloud connected security camera can eat a third of it easily.
I wonder how much tech peoples’ views are shaped by the fact that Seattle/the Bay Area have such awful broadband. (After all, broadband construction is mostly regulated at the municipal level, and so varies greatly depending on where you live.) Here in Maryland, 60% of people have access to fiber. Verizon in urban/suburban areas, and in rural areas, the state government is building a fiber backbone for municipal fiber networks to hook into. Almost everywhere also has cable. 4G coverage maps are a sea of color. For the most part, our housing prices also aren’t crazy, because we don’t have crazy anti-development/historical preservation laws. I don’t think these things are unrelated. We have pretty good municipal government here, outside Baltimore. I paid well under $500k for a 4BR house on the water, less than 30 minutes to four train stations, and with two fiber providers. Silicon Valley, by contrast, seems like some parody of American municipal mismanagement.
I am sure there are rural areas in Bay Area that have coverage issues, but definitely not true for urban areas. San Francisco itself has a ton of providers including Monkey Brains, Webpass, Sonic etc. I am on AT&T Fiber and it straight up 1gig up and down at all times.
70% of the city proper has gigabit for $65 a month from Centurylink, OP is out in the fringes where they allowed VDSL2 deployment years ago (whereas Seattle was on ADSL), thus they missed out on upgrades in the last few years. Coverage map for the city proper: https://www.seattle.gov/tech/services/cable-service/cable-fr...
ex-Verizon areas that aren't rural generally have fiber coverage, excepting Finn Hill. They committed to a bunch of smaller suburbs to have 100% fiber coverage by 2008, which mostly got done. Sadly, they only go up to 300mbps symmetrical for $50/month iirc.
Seems like US regulators could just as easily decide that if the tech companies do anything really egregious the Europeans will smack them down so they don't need to do anything.
Let's take an example of Google being sanctioned and regulated for anti-competitive monopolistic practices abroad, but not broken up.
European or Asian (broad rhetorical buckets) regulations have no direct impact on US domestic regulations. Meaning that even if the EU held Google accountable they could continue to operate at home without changing their practices. While the argument can be made that regulation is likely to follow domestically I don't think that can be held as a truism under current geopolitical landscape.
Even if domestic regulations followed there would undoubtedly be a gap, during which companies would leverage that imbalance. Google would be pressured to make the most of its advantage in its shrinking monopolistic market while smaller companies would press their advantage abroad where they have better access to the market, investors, and customers.
Domestic inaction would be a net loss in the face of foreign regulation.
Obviously there is more market concentration in telecom than say in frozen yogurt. But telecoms face competition (from DSL, cellular, and satellite) in almost every market. Comcast, for example, has 47% broadband market share even in its own footprint: https://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/news/2019/04/24/wha.... They also face competition across local markets. Verizon followed Google Fiber to the $70-80 for gigabit price point, even though it competed in no markets with Google.
50% of folks in Comcast’s footprint don’t subscribe. Those folks aren’t going without Internet access. For a significant portion of the market, those other alternatives are viable. That creates competition, though obviously less competition than an equivalent competitor. (I’ve been lucky to mostly live in FiOS territory, and now I’ve got two fiber lines to my house. But back when I lived in Wilmington, I had just Comcast. Instead of subscribing, we used a T-Mobile hotspot the whole time. It was fine. With 5G, that phenomenon is only going to increase.)
Pew reported in Jan 2018 that only 65% of adults are home broadband users. That's down from a peak of 73% in 2016. Segmenting by age, fully 50% of people 65 or older do not use broadband internet at home.
So what are they using? Mobile phones--Pew says 20% of adults do not have broadband at home, but own a smartphone. Or nothing--Pew reported that 11% of U.S. adults do not use the Internet at all.
And what % of people that actually have alternatives like FiOS (unlike me) don't subscribe to comcast? Saying 50% of subscribers in Comcast's footprint is prevaricating about the bush AF. Why, you ask? If 50% of potential Comcast subscribers have an alternative to Comcast, that would mean 100% of people with an alternative are taking advantage of the free market. Which would mean that 100% of the people remaining are likely forced to subscribe through a lack of access to alternatives.
I don't even have working voice cell coverage at my house, much less data. Again, almost certainly due to a an entrenched monopoly limiting the market outreach of competition, and thereby obviating the requirement that they themselves perform adequately enough to retain customers.
For your hypothetical to hold, you’d expect to see some providers with near 100% market share. (You’d also have to assume Comcast builds and maintains infrastructure to millions of households in areas where it has no market share.) Who are they? FiOS’s market share is 40% in its footprint. AT&T’s fiber is around 25% now, hoping to reach 50% by 2023.
The only other way to get your math to work out is to assume that only a very small portion of Comcast’s footprint has no other cable/fiber competitor.
As to your cell situation—what mechanism do you think creates this competition-limiting monopoly? And why doesn’t that same mechanism apply to say my house (in the DC exurbs), where all of the big 4 have a decent signal? (Or the majority of the country, where at least three providers have coverage?)
If changing the product is evidence of competition, then Google Search and Android must have some, since they are continuously being worked on and new versions released.
Responding to a specific price point is the sign of competition, not general improvements in the product. AT&T built a gold-plated, state-of-the-art telephone network in the “Ma Bell” days, without facing competition. (And gave us the transistor and C and UNIX while they were at it. Google in many ways fits the same “benevolent monopoly” mold. I think it would be unwise to take antitrust action against Google for that reason.)
Verizon may have price matched Google, but Verizon fiber service is only available to a small fraction of the country. The cable companies, which have a much larger footprint than Verizon's fiber, have mostly limited price cuts to markets where they face competition from fiber. Comcast for example still charges $150 for gigabit (1000/35 Mbps) in most markets. By contrast markets were a competitor has built out fiber get the price cut in half. If this isn't a tacit admission that they are abusing their lack of competition by price gouging, I don't know what is.
> So if you look nationally, yes, the coverage is split between several companies, but at the local levels the areas serviced are often carved up such that there are local monopolies.
It's not just that they are monopolies, but that they are anticompetitive monopolies. In some cases, they are even granted by local governments.
Wired internet carriers having monopolies are almost all because of local laws and agreements. The only way to bust it is to say those "rights of way" restrictions are illegal...which isn't going to happen.
> the only way to bust it is to say those "rights of way" restrictions are illegal
Or to impose compulsory sub-licensing of those wires at fair and reasonable terms defined by a government agency. Like other countries with wire monopolies are doing.
Yes, it's called local franchising. It's incredibly common. That is why most/all cities only have one cable provider and one telecom provider over land lines.
> SEC. 7. AWARD OF FRANCHISES; PROMOTION OF COMPETITION.
(a) ADDITIONAL COMPETITIVE FRANCHISES.-
(1) AMENDMENT.-Section 621(a)(1) of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 541(a)(1)) is amended by inserting before the period at the end the following. ; except that a franchising authority may not grant an exclusive franchise and may not unreasonably refuse to award an additional competitive franchise. Any applicant whose application for a second franchise has been denied by a final decision of the franchising authority may appeal such final decision pursuant to the provisions of section 635 for failure to comply with this subsection.
Most big cities--which have the density to have multiple viable wire-line competitors--don't have competition for the same reason they have high housing prices. They make it onerous to build infrastructure. Baltimore, for example, would be a great Google Fiber city. It has city-owned conduits everywhere that would make deployment relatively easy. But nobody wants to build fiber there, because the city insists that every neighborhood has to be wired up, without regard to potential demand: https://www.wypr.org/post/why-comcast-one-and-only-cable-and...
> “We’ve, in fact, asked other cable operators if they’re interested in coming into the city and, so far, nobody else is,” says Minda Goldberg, a chief solicitor in the city’s Law Department.
> But don’t pop the champagne. Many factors could derail the progress. One is a complaint sometimes raised when Google, in particular, starts negotiating with a community. The complaint? The new investment will create a digital divide because Google does not commit to connect every neighborhood. The argument, while sometimes well-intentioned, ignores history, economics, and the reality of the digital divide. Moreover, its proponents fail to acknowledge the consequences of their arguments.
> As we have seen in Gig.U negotiations, must-build requirements make projects unsustainable. Communities can wish for anything they want but if the economics don’t work, it won’t happen. Recently, Los Angeles put out a request for proposal (RFP) seeking a guaranteed citywide fiber build out. Broadband policy expert Harold Feld correctly noted, “I look forward to their RFP for a unicorn supplier, because I think it's about as likely under these terms.”
Yeah, but census blocks are too big. Also, if one person in a census block has that level of access, the entire block is counted. The ISPs know this and game it. They will make their service available to one house in all the blocks that neighbor a block they actually serve, so they can get five blocks instead of one.
Unfortunately, the FCC's tracking data for broadband availability is notoriously poor.[1]. Think "regulatory capture" and, if you'e seen The Wire, "juking the stats".
There are -- I am sure -- legitimate criticisms of the report, but that link isn't doing those arguments any justice.
> But the 2019 version of the report has come with an unusual amount of political baggage
What? Why baggage? How? Zero explanation, just FUD.
> The census block system relies on data that only shows where providers could easily offer service, not where they actually do.
Yes, that's how it works. Also why every ISP I know charges a connection fee: they're not going to connect unless you first agree to be a customer.
> Starks’ statement questioned the figures. “It’s incredible to me that an error this large — approximately 62 million in overstated broadband connections — didn’t materially change the report,” he said.
BarrierFree is a New England service provider [1], in urban centers where customers have numerous internet options. [2] Without altogether leaving their geographic regions, there's simply no way for their results to affect the FCC report. Probably why their mistake initially went unnoticed.
> Starks points out in his statement that some blocks are larger than 250 square miles.
Maybe 0.01% of the time. No wonder this man is perplexed at statistical averages. Look at any census map and you'll see that census blocks are very focused.
And to top it all off, the article includes zero suggestions for improving the admittedly imperfect measurement. Comes off as just a hit piece.
> And to top it all off, the article includes zero suggestions for improving the admittedly imperfect measurement. Comes off as just a hit piece.
It's really easy to fix, but just more work.
How about the actual number of homes that can get high speed data? The ISPs already know this to the single address, because when you go to their website to sign up, they tell you right there if you're qualified based on your address.
All they have to do is be forced to share that database with the FCC.
The FCC has a map app.[1] Go and plug in some random addresses.
The link below is for a NJ suburb , and lists 6 ISP competitors. But three of them are just satellite services and two are Verizon. In practice, there are exactly two competitors here: the phone monopoly and the cable monopoly, but the FCC would point to this to say that there's robust competition!
Here's another one I just picked at random, in a suburb of Oklahoma City.[2] The FCC lists 9 different providers. 3 of them are Satellite, 2 are Cox Cable, and 4 are AT&T. Again, there are exactly two competitors here: the phone monopoly and the cable monopoly. Look around yourself.
Two long-term competitors are not enough for meaningful competition. Duopoly competition has the same strategic profile as the Prisoner's Dilemma. When you have the same two players in the game over a long period of time, they learn to cooperate. See Axelrod (1980) etc...
Regulatory capture, juking the stats, crooks and liars all.
And if you wanted to place an ad online to say, reach everyone in the US of driving age (car ad), or in Toronto during an NBA game (Pizza ad) what are all your options?
If you wanted to place a television ad to reach everyone in Toronto watching an NBA game, what are your options? You buy from the people who literally negotiated an exclusive right to air said game.
Now you're talking about the ad business, not the search business. In truth, Google isn't a search company, it's a advertising company with a search engine for market research. Once you look at it that way, you realize that Facebook and Amazon (to a certain extent) are direct competitors to Google, and they can't all be monopolies at the same time.
> "...and they can't all be monopolies at the same time."
semantically, that's true (since mono- implies one) but that doesn't mean that they can't all exert monopoly power in the same market and be an oligopoly. each establishes unfair advantages in the same market and stifles competition, like effectively excluding new extrants, for instance.
monopolized markets aren't simply defined by the number of dominant players, but rather by how fair and competitive the markets are. while market share is an often-present characteristic of monopolists, you could have one player with 60% market share that doesn't have sufficient market poewr to raise prices. and higher profit margins resulting from undue influence over a market (with or without significant market share) can be the telling characteristic of a monopolist.
in constrast, (asian) night markets seem to be a paragon of competitive markets, where there will be 29 competitors for the same product all lined up in a row.
If Google began to charge for their services, at least there would be a way out. If a single market telecom raised prices or change policies, there isn't any real recourse.
I wonder if the standard for excessive profits truly measures profit and not simply price increases and deceptive service charges.
If it is the later I can say I have definitely been harmed by cost cutting measures related to quality of service within telecom. Contractors who don't have enough training and are overworked have completely supplanted full time personnel who know their company's product and can provide competent support.
Bing was caught getting their search results in part from google and their response was "who cares". Last I checked Duckduckgo got their results from other places like bing and yahoo (who also uses google's results). One way or another, google's results are what you're getting no matter who you're using it seems.
aren't you conflating market share with the existence of competition? anyone has the choice to switch to bing today, but many people have no choice of telecom provider (cellular internet doesn't work for all the people in areas with bad cellular reception to begin with).
> anyone has the choice to switch to bing today, but many people have no choice of telecom provider
Do they though? I mean, bing exists, sure, but it's inferior and more expensive (by lacking quality). Hey, you can switch to satellite telephony/internet or connect two tin cans with a string if you really want to get off of your mobile provider.
> cellular internet doesn't work for all the people in areas with bad cellular reception to begin with
But the majority of US citizens have a choice, right, the population centers do have multiple carriers?
For example if I wanted to purchase internet, I have a choice of two providers. If I don't choose either of those two, I cannot have internet.
For search providers, I have a choice among a much larger variety. Google may have larger market share, but you're not locked into using Google like you are with your ISP.
There's a difference between having multiple potentially inferior choices and only having two choices full stop. In my experience living across multiple states now you don't have a choice of ISP.
> For search providers, I have a choice among a much larger variety.
I'm from EU, Google has 95%++ market share here and there are not other serious options (besides Google's resellers, which are a bit slower, and not quite as good, but close). Bing exists, but the quality is abysmal, so it really isn't an option, just as satellite internet probably isn't for most US states (I assume - it is an option in Europe, albeit not a great one).
A counterpoint to that is that Bing's quality or accessability is not effected in any way by Google. Microsoft made a shitty search engine no one wants to use. Everyone CAN use it, so it is a viable option. Just like Le Bernardin is a viable option to McDonalds. (ignore the price difference, as it is immaterial to this discussion)
> ignore the price difference, as it is immaterial to this discussion
If you ignore the price, you have plenty of options for wired internet: hire a company to lay fiber straight to your home, connect it to a data center on the other end. Price and quality are the big factors in whether something is an alternative. Dial up or GPRS isn't an alternative to broadband, not because it's much more expensive, but because of the quality of service. Satellite internet can provide you with all the bandwidth you need, where ever you need it, but the price is prohibitive.
That is definitely not an option for the vast, vast majority of people in the US. Doesn't matter how much money you offer, good luck digging up Pacific Street to lay a fiber cable directly from a data center to your mansion on billionaire row.
Your neighbor on billionaire row where most Americans apparently live will gladly allow you to tunnel under his land, I'm sure. Since money isn't an issue, offer him a billion or two.
I do agree with you though: saying money isn't an issue when looking for alternatives is absurd. You can pretty much solve anything by throwing money at it. "You have an option if you consider it an option to pay 10x or 100x the price" misses the point entirely imho.
It's not just your neighbors, it's the city, and the activists who know their way around the labyrinth of regulations (not all of whom can be bought off without someone else just taking their place).
Would breaking google into 4 companies give us 4 googles or 4 bings? Considering that the more data you have, the better your results, it seems like winner take all is the norm in any sort of data-driven tech.
Google + FB has 85% of the mobile ad market, with margins upwards of 25% of their ENTIRE business, not just the mobile ad market. I'd estimate that their effective margin on just search + ads to be somewhere in the 200-300% range so they can afford to do everything else. The fact that no competitors can get in on margins like THAT, at ANY price, tells you something.
I absolutely believe investors would collectively drop a cool $50 billion if they could become a direct competitor to Google. Why can't they? Not because Google will go after them in a direct way, but network effects are de-facto monopolies, and you'd probably have to spend a $500b dollars and never make money to start making a real dent. Its an impassable moat - the only chance any company has is to have a massive share of whichever platform comes next.
The question becomes, are companies that are successful due to network effects worthy of anti-trust probes? Network effects will always lead to monopolies since the incentive for someone to switch to a new service must have an increasingly larger value proposition over the incumbent.
There are alternatives to Google search. I used them before Google existed. I still use them today, when I want to. I have the choice, which is exactly the difference between the telco monopolies and this tempest in a teapot about Google.
>Meanwhile, there is no viable competition in sight for Google Search
I don't see how this can be true, Search is one of the most vulnerable, least defensible, no-moat services Google offers, and also its most important. DDG and others suffice for mainstream searches, even if techies and others notice Google is still better for niche specialist topics.
It's very easy to switch, only habit and "it just works" keep mainstream searchers on Google. As a monopoly it seems so tenuous, a far cry from owning a natural monopoly on physical infrastructure.
To me this is not the biggest issue. The biggest problem is YouTube.
YouTube is a ravenous black hole that you can't keep content out of--and that is ALL Google's fault. If I put a video online and I don't want it on YouTube and it winds up there, YouTube should have to pay a sufficient fine in a timely enough fashion such that it won't happen again.
Instead, Google banks on the fact that the small guys would have to expend so much money to fight Google that it isn't worth it. That's behavior that the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age would be quite familiar with.
If you are the copyright holder, you can have them take it down.
But also what you're asking for is ridiculous. It's not reasonable to expect content aggregators/platforms to be able to conduct provenance investigations on all content.
Why should YouTube be liable when someone with a vendetta misuses their platform?
> It's not reasonable to expect content aggregators/platforms to be able to conduct provenance investigations on all content.
Why not? A mere mortal would have to get permission from me to derive a monetary benefit from my content. Why should we exempt Google from that?
People seem to have forgotten that it is not the job of the content creators to make sure that Google has a scalable business. If Google can't scale provenance clearance, then they should have to shut down general uploading.
YouTube is not a search engine and does not deserve the same protections.
> Why should YouTube be liable when someone with a vendetta misuses their platform?
Because Google has legal recourse against the person with the vendetta for recovery. You can also make situations like this eligible for exemption (but Google would have to prove it).
However, this kind of situation is BY FAR the exception. Far more common is someone uploading and monetizing content that is not theirs to do so.
> Why not? A mere mortal would have to get permission from me to derive a monetary benefit from my content. Why should we exempt Google from that?
Right, but that mere mortal is the one defrauding Google.
> YouTube is not a search engine and does not deserve the same protections.
DMCA safe harbor doesn't apply specifically to search engines.
> Far more common is someone uploading and monetizing content that is not theirs to do so.
Yes, that's defrauding Google. The point is that Google shouldn't be liable for when someone defrauds them.
> Because Google has legal recourse against the person with the vendetta for recovery.
The problem here is that you're claiming that google should be liable for a painful enough fine that it won't happen again. If you're our for punitive damages against a billion dollar corporation, no, you can't, get recourse from an individual. Sure google could sue me for the value of the fine, but that doesn't mean I can pay.
> Yes, that's defrauding Google. The point is that Google shouldn't be liable for when someone defrauds them.
Except that Google is still defrauding me too. Google should not get to make money off of my content without my permission.
If Google were simply hosting the content and not serving ads, not taking paid subscriptions, etc. then your points that Google should not be liable for the behavior of the users holds a lot more water.
For example, YouTube could set the default that everybody can upload, but people can only monetize or serve ads on content after verification. Now, I still think YouTube would need to be disincentivized as it is still freeloading off the commons, but that's a very different problem, and YouTube is in a much more sympathetic position.
Now, would all of this kill YouTube? Quite possibly. However, once you prevent YouTube from freeloading, you might actually get a video service that has a business model that doesn't suck.
>It's not reasonable to expect content aggregators/platforms to be able to conduct provenance investigations on all content.
Why? It's content they have no license for right on their servers. It's a purely political decision for providing safe harbor. But there could be made legal arguments for doing not.
Then make those arguments. Don't just say you can. HN is a much more interesting place if you do!
But as for why most of those legal arguments don't make sense: what you're suggesting is that if I defraud you, you're now partially liable for the damages from that fraud to third parties, even though you're one of the injured parties.
There is plenty of competition for the search market, Google wins based on their superior product. That's wildly different than the situation in telecoms. The mobile OS example is more compelling.
How competitive is the healthcare market? Would breaking up the big players or lowering the barrier to entry help with the outrageous cost of healthcare?
No. The problem with healthcare is they can't compete against each other: Imagine you just got into a car accident. There's no way you can shop around for the best deal on a hospital while your head is bleeding out. Due to the fact that competition is impossible, we need to strictly regulate the healthcare market to prevent the predatory healthcare that's given. Right now, they can make up any number they want and charge you for it.
I don't like it because it's not how market economies are supposed to work, but we absolutely need strict controls on pricing. For example: instead of allowing them to charge 4000$ for an ambulance ride, set the limit to something more reasonable, say 100-300$ depending on the COL in that area.
Also, expanding the labor supply of doctors and nurses would also help. Right now, there are strict limits on the # of doctors that can be made.
is $300 a fair price for an ambulance ride though? paying a skilled paramedic + driver for (say) an hour seems to exceed $300, when you factor in the overhead of the ambulance itself (not to mention services rendered).
edit: i ask that question, because who is going to eat that cost?
The ambulance cost should be negligable. An ambulance should cost roughly 30-50c a mile. i don't see why it would cost more than that. And the wages for a paramedic and driver should be less than 100$/hour, right?
If the hospital is charging 200$/hour or more for administration or more then they should eat that cost
let's say the wages for a paramedic + driver (including overhead of payroll taxes, benefits, malpractice insurance, etc etc) is $75/hour. How do you figure 50c/mile? Gas? What about all the expensive medical equipment in the ambulance, skill training to use it, service it, insurance on the vehicle, maintenance of the engine/tires, compliance with whatever regulations exist on ambulance service providers....?
basically it says the milleage is just 84$ (that includes all ambulance related costs: maintenance, gas, depreciation of the ambulance, etc) and that's already being very generous.
Another 127$ goes to state of new york. we can get rid of that entirely.
they didn't mention the cost of labor, but we can assume about 75$/hr as you said. maybe another 75$/hr for rediness. "Part of what shocked Santoro is the fact that he received what he considered very little care: An EMT took his vitals and gave him oxygen, he said"
Where the heck does alll the rest of the 2100$ go? I would guess: It's all markup that goes to administrative waste and profits.
So, let's get rid of the extra 2100$ worth of administration and keep everyone's ambulance bills lower. that will lower your health insurance bill by a huge amount too.
I'd give Google more than 90% of the search market. It's hard to find a search engine that doesn't use google results in some form or another. Bing does, Yahoo does, and sites like duckduckgo which use those other search engine end up using google by extension
I would say the strongest example is wired telecom, which may not be a national monopoly but is certainly a local monopoly across nearly the whole country. The way the companies divvy up territory to avoid competition is probably what keeps U.S. prices so much higher than, say, Europe. I wonder if a case could be made for it being a cartel.
But yes, cellular and satellite providers have started to provide a saving grace of disruption in that market. We'll see if it ends up being enough.
Look at profit margins though. Apple and Facebook are consistently 30%+ and Google is 20%+. Verizon, Comcast, and the rest of the telecoms are in the low to mid teens or worse. That's pretty close to the S&P 500 average margin.
So while it appears that wired telecom is a monopoly they don't make money like monopolies. Compare Google Fiber with Google Plus. Google had people literally begging them to put Fiber in but backed off because they couldn't make (enough) money. Plus was a hugely important project for them but they canceled it because they couldn't beat Facebook.
We've seen major tech companies take aim at the monopoly/duopoly product of a rival and they've all failed:
Microsoft poured billions into Bing, Maps and mobile for little market share
> Google had people literally begging them to put Fiber in but backed off because they couldn't make (enough) money.
Was that the reason, or was it because the other telecom companies were lobbying to keep Google from accessing rights of way and expanding to other cities. (One failed example:[0])
In many jurisdictions, the cable and telecom companies are attempting to make it illegal for municipalities to install their own government-run internet because they really don't want to compete. It's ridiculous. [1]
Had Google been allowed to compete like in other industries, they probably would have crushed the telecom companies. But they weren't allowed to.
> or was it because the other telecom companies were lobbying to keep Google from accessing rights of way and expanding to other cities. (One failed example:[0])
A failed lobbying example is terrible evidence compared to the sweetheart deals Google got and the lengths cities went to attract Google (from Wikipedia):
The initial location was chosen following a competitive selection process.[18] Over 1,100 communities applied to be the first recipient of the service.[19][20] Google originally stated that they would announce the winner or winners by the end of 2010; however, in mid-December, Google pushed back the announcement to "early 2011" due to the number of applications.[21][22][23]
The request form was simple, and, some have argued, too straightforward.[24] This led to various attention-getting behaviors by those hoping to have their town selected.[24] Some examples are given below:
Baton Rouge, Louisiana supporters remade the Supertramp song "Give a Little Bit" to "Give a Gigabit".
Greenville, South Carolina utilized 1,000 of their citizens and glow sticks to create "The World's First and Largest People-Powered Google Chain."[25] From an aerial view, the title "Google" was colorfully visible.
A small plane bearing a banner reading "Will Google Play in Peoria, IL?" flew over the Google campus in Mountain View, California.[26]
The mayor of Duluth, Minnesota, jokingly proclaimed that every first-born child will be named either Google Fiber or Googlette Fiber.[27]
The city of Rancho Cucamonga, California, dubbed their city, "Rancho Googlemonga".[28]
One of the islands in Sarasota, Florida, was temporarily renamed "Google Island".[24]
Municipalities and citizens have also uploaded YouTube videos to support their bids. Some examples:
A YouTube video in support of Sarasota, Florida, used the Bobby McFerrin song "Don't Worry, Be Happy".[24] A video for Sarasota was uploaded through Facebook’s video service.[24]
Comedian and United States Senator Al Franken made a YouTube video to support the bid of Duluth, Minnesota.[29]
Ann Arbor, Michigan, has its own YouTube channel[30] featuring a David Letterman-style Top Ten list delivered by town VIPs such as Mayor John Hieftje and University of Michigan President Mary Sue Coleman. Ann Arbor also held a city-wide GoogleFest,[31] kicking off with a gathering of hundreds of participants dancing and chanting "Ann Arbor Google Fiber, ain't Nothing any finer."[32]
Yes, and I'm sure if I could and it would get me a competent ISP I would climb a skyscraper and do headspins on top. Local municipalities have given sweetheart deals to basically everyone that agreed to lay cable. This difference is that in the couple years Google was an ISP they didn't pull any obvious bullshit [yet] on their customers like other ISPS.
It seems pretty clear to me that ISP is like landlord - they need to either be nonprofit or it is a matter of time until whoever is in charge discovers or is replaced by someone who knows that most of the customers are pretty darn stuck and can be shaken for loose change.
I feel like the fact that cities are willing to kowtow to google for Please God Any Alternative To Our Isp Overlords is evidence that the ISPs are doing something that is particularly bad and most small governments are powerless to stop it.
>But the key thing was that city officials promised to get out of the media giant's way. They didn't dangle tax breaks, but they did deliver access to public rights of way, expedite the permiting process, offer space in city facilities and provide assistance with marketing and public relations.
Provo sold them their fiber network for $1 as another example. Every city that got Google Fiber gave up concessions and promised to help Google expedite construction.
> Verizon, Comcast, and the rest of the telecoms are in the low to mid teens or worse. That's pretty close to the S&P 500 average margin.
I would want to see the margins for just operating high speed internet service. I suspect their overall margins are lower because their financial picture is clouded by things like cable TV and content costs. A big reason why telecoms suck is precisely because if you just want high speed internet, they force you to buy all their bullshit content as well (for me, it's cheaper to buy internet + cable TV than just internet!), and they make it hard to buy that content any other way. The main action I'd like to see taken against telecoms is to force them to spin off their content businesses (and they never should have been allowed to buy them in the first place).
The opposite is true. Video service enables companies to charge enough to justify broadband deployment. That’s why Google and Verizon offer video over their fiber service even though they don’t really have their own content. Verizon won’t expand FiOS into Baltimore because it can’t get a television franchise from the city without agreeing to onerous build-out requirements. Without video revenues FiOS isn’t really viable.
Google Fiber charged $70/mo for internet, and $130/mo for cable TV [1]. Standalone TV streaming services are also around $50/mo (e.g. hulu [2], youtube live TV packages [3]).
Something doesn't add up. If it costs $50/mo to get cable TV content, why does it cost me $-10/mo with comcast?
>I would want to see the margins for just operating high speed internet service
You can't really break it out that way. The TV service and internet service use the same physical wire. That's a fixed cost per household and once you have it, it's only marginally more expensive to send TV with the internet. Double so since people without cable packages tend to replace them with streaming services.
> That's a fixed cost per household and once you have it, it's only marginally more expensive to send TV with the internet.
That values the content at near zero, which I think is not correct, and part of the game telecoms are playing with their (local) monopoly pricing power.
Why do profit margins matter at all here? It's only a signal that there is a problem if margins are very high because there is no guarantee that an entrenched monopolistic company will be efficient or make a strong profit.
If you want to do a comparison compare consumer internet cost vs performance to places with a healthy and regulated market for internet service.
Also, by this logic Amazon could never be regulated. It doesn't make sense.
>Why do profit margins matter at all here? It's only a signal that there is a problem if margins are very high because there is no guarantee that an entrenched monopolistic company will be efficient or make a strong profit.
If they were really wasting ~20% of their revenue someone would buy them or do a hostile takeover.
Unless they are spending most of that "wasted' money on capturing markets and paying legal firms to stomp out any potential competition. Or the constant advertising campaigns for services that me and many others have never had access to. I see comcast commercials every day, ive never lived in an area with comcast available. Just because they aren't making huge profits doesn't means they are spending that money on providing services.
Why risk innovation when stomping out competition is much more straight forward and predictable?
Do you have any numbers showing that any of these companies spend somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% of their revenues on capturing markets and legal firms?
the wireline operators are mature companies, amazon is investing heavily in growth. this is an obvious distinction. courts and regulators constantly apply this sort of informed judgment and nuance to their analyses because it's required for their jobs.
I agree there are big differences between these ISPs and Amazon. I was just making the point that Amazon's lack of a profit wouldn't exempt it from these regulations either. Profit is as much a bookkeeping/tax/business policy as it is an actual market signal.
You can only fake it to a certain extent since you report cash flow. Even for cash flow from operating activities Google (35%), Apple (30%), and Facebook (52%!) outshone Comcast (25%).
The regulatory systems in the US since Reagan have been anemic, and if we believe in effective business competition there are probably very few industries that would have a good time if a new regulatory environment were put in place that is more... effective? I can't find the right word because I'm biased - I strongly believe in collectivism and strong regulatory environments.
When I look at major industries: social media (sadly, IMO), telecom, health care, transportation, military, and more; what I see are industries that need regulation in order to meet the needs of society, but that is based on my point of view of the world. My guess is that the folks with capital and data, and thus power, view the situation very differently, and are more focused on their own needs than those of a more nebulous society that has needs. I believe that this can be seen in the practices of businesses throughout the United States.
So, are "we" ignoring telecom? No, that headline is aggravating. Why isn't it "Antitrust issues in Telecom"? Because society has been trained to be enraged. Why? Because it serves those who already have power, and they disagree with me about how regulation should work.
It's the same across all government. You hollow out the function of actual, substantive work through 'necessary' budget cuts - like actual funding for IRS audits, any form of environmental regulation, or just education in general.
Then when the low-hanging fruit is all those agencies can pick, which happen to have the largest impact on middle- to low-income families, it gives more fodder to cut and gut the agencies.
Under the current regime (post-Reagan is what I mean), there are government bodies that still receive lots of money, and those, as you say, that are getting hollowed. The main thing that I can point to that says that it is corrupt is the fact that white collar crime is largely ignored in the interest of much smaller fish.
There are government agencies that I'd like to see gutted, though, like the prison system, the support of the weapons manufacturing industry by our military which I calculate as grotesquely unecessary, etc. There are others that disagree with me strongly on this issue. I'm not right, just opinionated.
I've yet to see a telecom company tell anyone who they are allowed to communicate with or deny anyone service because they don't approve of their ideological views. That might only be tangential to antitrust issues but engaging in overreach is a good way to get the public against you which in turn makes it much easier for the government to come after you.
And yet I've had to deal with telecom companies placing incredibly low data caps, overcharging for bullshit reasons, throttling consumer bandwidth when visiting certain sites or using certain protocols and more.
If Facebook decided to ban me tomorrow for whatever reason, I still have access to the rest of the internet. If my ISP decided to charge another $100 a month to access the internet, there would be nothing I could do to fight it.
You'd have to make an argument that site access is a right, which throws out moderating a platform for abuse or spam entirely.
It's just bad regulation, performed by incompetent or corrupt governments. Down here in NZ we have excellent telecoms regulation performed by competent government.
Specifically, copper/fibre last mile lines are owned by companies which are prevented by law from acting as ISPs, and similarly required to wholesale lease access to their lines to any ISP which wants to use them, at a regulated price (or lower).
The result is a hyper-competitive ISP market where I can choose from dozens of ISPs (almost) anywhere in the country. Combined with a few hundred million in government investment, and I can get gigabit fibre almost everywhere in the country from a world-class ISP.
I have basically no complaints about my ISP, and it's all thanks to government regulation.
Economics 101 states that wasteful duplication of infrastructure is one of the few acceptable exceptions from the free market thesis. Natural monopolies should nevertheless be regulated to avoid suboptimal services.
What’s more interesting is the recent suggestions of seeing industries with a monopolistic business model such as social media as natural monopolies. Perhaps we should regulate Facebook rather than argue for breaking up telecoms?
I don't think anybody ignores that telecoms is a big monopoly problem; people know intimately that they have one or if they are lucky, two real options in any given market.
We busted up Ma Bell once long ago, and it has just coalesced back together. The capital costs and infrastructure tend towards it being a natural monopoly, so I don't think that we'll reasonably see a million telecom flowers bloom without putting the finger on the scale heavily.
Software is so much more ephemeral, and we have a much healthier oligopoly of big players. Even the sick old man of computing, IBM, is doing better than Time Warner did trying to compete in cable.
I should explain: In simple terms, ENUM allows you to turn a phone number into a SRV record that points at a PBX via a DNS lookup. The ITU allocates the zones to registrars, the zones neatly map to country codes - its a great idea.
However, as you can imagine this is not very popular with big telecoms who are used to charging by the second/minute and location by distance which is obviously bollocks when you turn a circuit switched network into a packet switched one that no longer routes calls via satellites to cross the Atlantic (eg). OK pricing and tech for "POTS" has come a long way since I were a lad but it is still a nice little earner over letting us lot do our own thing.
You can also imagine that Google, Facebook int al would also suffer a collective coronary should us lot be able to do our own comms without them.
I'm fairly sure that you (for a given value of you) can't remember the last time you used a "landline" but if ENUM was available it might have been a few minutes ago and not logged externally and charged as though it was 1970 sigh
I think this is a poor take. Since Bork, anti-trust regulation has been an afterthought in Washington. The fact that DOJ, the same agency that bloodied Microsoft, is looking in another big tech company is very big news. DOJ lawyers aren't dumb, digging into BigTech will bring a lot of bodies to the surface and the culture of anti-trust regulation will change, eventually BigTeleco and BigAg will be next.
Who is "we", exactly? No-one is ignoring telecom monopolies, it's something people complain about all the damn time. Spoiler alert: it's because the telecom industry has spent decades embedding itself at the top levels of organizations like the FCC, and it's gotten worse since the arrival of the Trump administration. Is that good? No. Should we change it? Yes. Does any of this have anything to do with regulating big tech? No.
This stuff just feels like whataboutism to me. There's no reason we can't tackle both big tech and telecom. If wait turns then the telecom industry will just say "what about other utilities!". Those utilities will say "what about the defense industry!" or whatever the hell.
"What about these bad guys!!" just feels like an attempt to deflect attention away from tech.
The allegation here isn't that the average person is ignoring it, it's that the administration is giving preferential treatment. The government is supposed to be representative of the people, so I think that's why they're calling it "we".
It's not really, because the two (telecom and big tech) are in a fight for dominance and focusing on one will benefit the other. It's natural to wonder about the influence of telecom when the Attorney General, under whom the DOJ's investigation is being conducted, was the general counsel of GTE/Verizon for 14 years and then served on Time Warner's board until last year, helping them to merge with AT&T. If you assume the antitrust division of the DOJ has limited resources, and that they were until recently focused on telecom, it's not "whataboutism" to wonder what's driving the abrupt shift to tech.
I was forced this morning to have Comcast charge me $40 to install a cable to set up internet at my new place by an authorized technician. I hate Comcast SO much, and from what I can tell I don't seem to have another option, supposedly AT&T but the speeds are slow and their website says my apartment is not in service area.
The quality of AT&T's service is going to vary depending on where you are.
I have a gigabit connection from them that I pay $60 / month for (they lowered the price when I tried to leave). It's the fastest internet connection I've ever had.
Comparing software businesses with traditionally asset-heavy business such as wired telecom is disingenuous.
I hate Telecom monopolies as much as the next guy, but the comparison is so inaccurate to the point of being useless. What's next? Comparing 'Big Tech' to Utilities?
'Big Tech', unlike Telecom, has made itself friendless, having alienated pretty much everybody along the political spectrum, and that is a dangerous place to me with a field subject to such legal vagaries as antitrust law is. I am not talking here about lobbyists or about legal technicalities but rather about the visceral reaction we all can have as human beings to the basic question: do I sympathize or even relate to these people? At inception, Google, FB, et al. were seen as innovative, dynamic, helpful to average people and the like. Sadly, those days are long past and all too many people are instead inclined to reach for the nearest garlic clove in hopes of warding them off.
Because telecom companies' monopolies are easy to understand. Google doesn't have to run wires to everyone's house. In fact, they tried and failed. It's a lot harder than building a website.
There is some psychology amongst the regulators that results in them not fining or sanctioning large players because they don't want to make them go bankrupt and further consolidate the market.
You can have a monopoly in America, as long as you don't do anticompetitive things to get there, and don't do anticompetitive things while you are there from within your company. (protip: the trick is to change the laws and regulations to favor advantages you have and make it impossible for new entrants)
Checkout https://althea.org/ if you're interested in decentralized internet structure.
This is NOT vaporware. The theory behind it is simple and solid. It works and is happening right now. The fact that is uses shitcoins doesn't make it a scandal or get-rich-quick scheme.
The "problem" was that ILECs never followed the rules and regulators never punished them for that. If a CLEC wanted to add a customer, they got a schedule for 3 weeks, even though the ILEC would do it in less than a week if the customer were signing up with them. Anyway, the schedule was also a fiction, because the ILEC would come up with half a dozen reasons to delay it to 5 weeks. We're not talking about a technician visiting a customer's house. We're talking about a couple of switches thrown in a central office, an operation that would take less than a minute. How could anyone attract new customers in such a situation? That is why all CLECs went bust or were acquired for pennies on the dollar.
In other nations, with functioning regulation, unbundling was considered unworkable so they required that a separate entity would own the local loop.
If I were more cynical, I would say that the antitrust concerns are being focused on in big tech in part due to the perception of anti-conservative bias or de-platforming, and the telecoms, other than in the case of owning CNN, have no such perception associated with them.
Telcos and ISPs are the bigger threat by far in a fixed local monopoly physical market that is hard to enter.
Telecom/ISPs are afraid of antitrust, being labeled a utility and competition, they work overtime to throw the blame onto Big Tech starting way back with net neutrality and Netflix share of the market. It wasn't Netflix using the data it was the users. Since then ISPs have been funding mud slinging against Big Tech so they can compete with them on ads by removing privacy protections and content so they removed net neutrality against the will of everyone [1].
Maybe 5G will shake up the telcos and ISPs controls they have bribed to put in place using regulatory capture. The attack on Big Tech is partially funded by them just like oil companies pushed anti-nuclear energy along with opposition to green tech. Big Oil funded many of the anti-nuclear campaigns, probably even had some sabotage involved [2].
ISPs aren't even using the market to get ahead with good products like Big Tech, they are using bribes and regulations that keep them in their false monopolies and fixed markets.
ISPs share fixed local monopoly markets by putting one good ISP and a bunch of smaller ones that don't compete like a Game of Thrones.
FCC reports find almost no broadband competition at 100Mbps speeds, even at 25Mbps, 43 percent of the US had zero ISPs or just one [3]. For a modern broadband innovative market this is unacceptable, there are industries of the future that rely on fast network we can't even get going due to the feet dragging and rent-seeking local monopolies of the ISPs/telcos.
The one time innovators, the ISPs/telcos, have become local monopolies directly harming innovation and network growth, they now have data caps, net neutrality add-ons (like Cox Elite Gamer), content options and privacy protections removed to discourage and reward broadband providers for NOT growing but nickel and diming people [1].
I remember in the 90s when broadband, cable, ISPs, telcos were innovative and the leaps from landline to other sources was amazing. They were innovative then, run by engineers and product people. Now they are rent seekers, holding back innovation, run by HBS style MBAs where everything is a resource and every dime extracted with minimal reasons to innovate or expand without rent-seeking controls in place.
Imagine if water, electricity or other utilities were this toll road like, we'd live in less quality of life.
The network is a utility and platform to innovate and build on, not extract the value and slow innovation
I can invest some money right now and become a local ISP. Unless I'm ready to sink $500 billion, I cannot be Google.
This is how big of a problem it is. I would recommend any founder to delay startups and let anti trust probes and hopefully splits happen. Otherwise what happened to Snap, will happen to you.
Well to most people the internet is Big Tech. And the big tech internet is arguably corrosive. The only thing Telecom does is hinder people from getting more internet cheaper, faster.
Telecom is a different kind of problem, and it is not clear that antitrust can effectively address it. From a comment of mine a couple days ago when someone here raised a similar question:
> Wouldn't it make more sense to break up broadband ISP monopolies first?
Probably not for the Department of Justice. Some problems with that approach:
1. If you are trying to address the issue of limited choice in ISPs, I don't see how breaking them up addresses that. If you split an ISP that has a monopoly in a state, say, into separate ISPs for, say, each county...you've just gone from having one monopoly to having several monopolies. The limited choice is because there is only one cable coming into my house, and splitting up the company that owns that cable doesn't change that.
Addressing that probably requires something like making the last mile data transport a regulated utility that ISPs operate on top of. That would probably require Congressional action and a new President to do nationwide or to allow states to do individually.
2. Competition among ISPs in a region can vary dramatically city to city, and even neighborhood to neighborhood. I've not extensively researched this so maybe this is wrong, but the impression I've gotten is that an ISP's prices in a region tend to be pretty similar between those places within the region where they are the only choice, and those places within the region where there are alternatives with similar performing alternatives. That could make it hard to show that the ISP is abusing its monopoly in those parts of its territory where it does not have competition.
3. Aside from rural areas that only have DSL via the phone company, in most places there are multiple ISPs available. It's pretty common to have both cable and DSL, and in many cities there is also a fiber option. There's also wireless options, ranging from the regular consumer service of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon, and the various MVNOs that are built on those networks, and many places also have wireless available that is not based on the cellular networks.
You might argue that, say, cellular wireless is not really a viable option to Comcast or Charter or whoever the cable company is in a given area, due to the vast difference in speed. But you will have to actually make the argument. You won't be able to just say that they speed difference makes them different markets. You'll have to actually look at how people are using these various services and show that they really are not comparable.
I think that the factors in #2 and #3 make it almost impossible to win an antitrust case against a major ISP as a whole. The DoJ would have to bring smaller cases alleging monopolization in specific regions, tailored to the specific way the factors in #2 and #3 play out in that region.
Having to do this region by region, or even city by city in some regions, would make this a very long, expensive pursuit. (And where they win, there is still the question of whether or not there is an effective remedy they can apply).
Thus, it is probably better for the DoJ to leave this issue to Congress to deal with via legislation.
Getting individual Congressmen on your side is no cheaper than lawsuits by region. I fear there's no hope with the weakness of our current institutions - "reform" has been synonymous with cutting the scope and budget of regulatory agencies since Carter.
Spoilers: it's because our regulatory, legislative, and judicial infrastructure exists to defend monied interests. We're incapable of taking collective action that reduces private property accumulation, so no monopoly busting.
In both 2017 and 2018, Alphabet is the first listed corporation[0], which is probably the reason I see the claim made, most of the rest are associations.
[0]If you ignore BC/BS, which is a "federation of 36 independent companies", though that is largely a way to deal with the law requiring health insurance be in-state. If you want to, I'd accept saying Alphabet is the second corporation on the list, if we're being real.
It's a legitimate point, though, not mere Whataboutism. The Big Tech companies like Google have been a counter-weight to big Telecom (things like Google Fiber, Google Fi). To go after Big Tech without also going after Big Telecom is to reinforce the market power of Big Telecom.
Weren't Google Fiber and Google Fi just tests, not actual large scale investments? I mean, in that case, there are many counter-weights to Google - they just have 0% market share...
I don't believe that Big Tech has or wants to be anything to counter the ISP monopolies. Sure, they don't want to pay for traffic twice, but that's about it - if net neutrality wasn't an issue, Google, FB & Co wouldn't care about telecom monopolies one bit. In fact, I'm pretty sure they'd prefer a single large ISP that they can make data deals with to get a better tracking system up and running.
I think Big Tech care about internet access (=more customers and/or more people to advertise to), so the extent to which Big Telecom has poor access in rural areas, it's in Big Tech's interests to offer some alternative.
...but perhaps you're right that beyond that, they don't really care if there's just one choice in major ISP in much of the US. At least, the incentive to care is not as strong.
> Nobody wants to be beholden to a single provider -- that's incredibly dangerous for a tech company.
Eh, sure, but Google likes to make one big deal with Master Card to buy your cc transactions, they don't want to make a thousand deals with small local banks.
As for Fiber & Fi, it looked to me as if Google was checking to see if they could easily and cheaply "disrupt" those markets. They saw that they could not and cut their losses.
> If the only CC provider was Mastercard then no deal would be had for Google.
Why not? It's bonus money for MC, why wouldn't they be happy to sell Google access to your transaction data? They don't have to do anything but copy the data and hold their hands out for millions and millions of dollars. Why in the world wouldn't they make that deal? Privacy concerns? I have my doubts.
Absolutely whataboutism, and whataboutism that vastly misses on the scale of the issue: Telecoms are limited regional monopolies (and rarely are monopolies in urban enough of areas), tech companies are nearly unassailable global monopolies. The article aims to capitalize on the popular dislike of their ISP to distract from a far more pressing issue.
> and rarely are monopolies in urban enough of areas
I challenge you to name urban areas in the US that are serviced by more than 3 ISP's. They absolutely do have monopolies in those areas, and more importantly, the ability to collude to set prices in various areas/divy up coverage area.
Because even Comcast, the most evil of the telecom companies, doesn't put out a web browser that seeks to permanently entrench its ad business. In fact, it lets me use any browser I want.
But, again, they don't seem to use Comcast Business Layer A to entrench Comcast Business Layer B. They could put a tax on every call to Stripe API if they wanted. They don't. The worst thing they've done is throttle Netflix (very bad) and the market spoke and they were shamed publicly.
It also matters what is happening going forward. Even in areas with no wired competition, wireless (cellular and satellite) exerts competitive pressure. 15% of high income households have abandoned wired internet for cellular only, and that number is growing. (There are more cellular-only households by a large margin than ones that use something other than Google search.) Meanwhile, there is no viable competition in sight for Google Search or Android.